Prepaid telecommunications services are increasing in popularity, especially with regard to family members or persons with special relations, interested clients or customers, the credit challenged or persons with no established credit (e.g., teens), and voters or donors for political candidates.
A customer typically purchases a prepaid calling card for the service, and when activated by the customer, the service provider that issued the prepaid calling card credits the customer's account with the amount of the prepaid card. Known prepaid calling cards are typically sold in fixed value increments ($10, $20, etc.) and require access codes (i.e., personal identification number or PINs) for their usage. To use the prepaid calling card, a designated access telephone number is dialed by the cardholder for accessing a computerized call processor system. When the call is connected to the calling system, the cardholder enters his access code or PIN to connect to a desired destination telephone number. Typically a beep sounds at this point. A charge is then deducted by the call processor system from the account or balance associated with the access code. The computerized call processor then connects the user to the designated called number after acknowledging the access code. Typically, the prepaid service call processor system will apply in real-time a usage charge on a per-minute basis debiting the account balance as the call proceeds.
With prepaid calling card services in the currently known art, the purchaser of the service can give the prepaid calling card to another person for calling time use. Typically there has been no thought given to some kind of customized message for the use of the calling card holders unless they are known subscribers to a system.
Thus, a need exists for a way to broadcast a message, a selected custom message, which can be easily changed to an individual or group of calling card holders without requiring the account holders to reveal private information about themselves and without requiring the account holders to become subscribers to a service.
A need exists for a method to provide changeable messages to holders of prepaid calling cards to increase marketing by the providers of the prepaid calling cards.
The present embodiments meet these needs.